Performance issues on Windows

[rooby]

I'm not sure if it is specific to my work environment but pancake takes an extremely long time to run on Windows using latest LTS of node (currently 8.11.3).

If I use node 6.14.3 it is significantly faster but still a lot slower than on a mac.

[pattyde]

@alex-page any chance this is related to #72? Or is it something specific to Windows?

[alex-page]

I think this was before #72 however I can investigate it further.

[alex-page]

This is being moved into QA, waiting for publishing of new versions of components ( with updated pancake ) to test.

[alex-page]

@rooby I did a test just after moving back to node-sass. The test was done on a slower older windows computer and a 2015 macbook pro. I used the gnomon package to see how long tasks were taking.

This is definitely an issue, installing 25 components took 171.98s on a slower windows computer vs 50.41s on a faster macbook pro.

Main points to note:

• node-sass is a pretty big install and slower internet connections without an already cached binary can slow it down ( 9 seconds to download the windows binary vs 0.07s seconds for a cached mac binary )
• pancake is a pretty intensive script and can probably be optimised for windows devices, currently it takes around 3.7 seconds per component on windows vs 0.86s on mac
• The install of the packages were also slower on my windows laptop taking 20.35 seconds versus 8.49s on the macbook pro

This ticket would mainly be looking into the second point around optimising the pancake post install script for windows devices.

Some things to note are that the main things that take time in the pancake script are the compilation of sass -> css and minification of javascript. These are dependencies of the project and can be slower depending on the hardware., operating system and node-sass binary used. This ticket would be more looking into ways to speed up the pancake postinstall process, maybe we could try running the css and js tasks in parallel instead of synchronously.